The Mediocrity Feedback Loop

If leading media critics don’t expect much, filmmakers won’t deliver much. By Charlotte Allen

Alfie Williams as Spike (left) and Ralph Fiennes as Dr. Kelson in 28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025) CAP/PLF Supplied by Capital Pictures (Alamy)

Note: the following review contains spoilers.

I went to see 28 Years Later because a headline in the Spectator World called it “the movie of the summer.” I had never seen either director Danny Boyle’s 2002 original, 28 Days Later, or the 2007 follow-up, 28 Weeks Later, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. In fact, I hadn’t seen a single Boyle film since his Best Picture-winner Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. But 28 Years Later has been a minor hit (US$100 million in gross revenues during the first two weeks on a US$60 million budget), and Alexander Larman, the Spectator World’s book editor, assured me:

It’s probably Danny Boyle’s most accomplished picture since 2007’s Sunshine, and shows the now 68 year-old director’s almost casual proficiency at building tension and horror, as well as more unexpected moments of tenderness and beauty.

What’s not to love about that? Other critics had also given the film rave reviews, heaping praise on Boyle and his screenwriter, Alex Garland, who had collaborated with him on the 2002 original. So, even though I am not really a zombie-movie buff, I took myself to the cinema to see what the fuss was all about.

28 Years Later opens in 2002 when a marauding gang of the “infected” launch a murderous attack on a small group of Scottish children as they watch the Teletubbies (a 1997–2001 BBC children’s series that became notorious in the US after Jerry Falwell accused one of the ’tubbies of being a “gay role model”). As those who have seen the two prequels will know, the infected aren’t really zombies because they are not reanimated corpses. They are living people transformed into carnivorous braindead predators by the release of a Rage virus at the start of the 2002 film, which is then passed on via bodily fluids. And unlike the lumbering, staggering zombies portrayed in, say, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the infected run after their prey and are possessed of superhuman strength.

One of the kids, a little blond boy named Jimmy (Rocco Haynes), manages to escape. He runs to his father (Sandy Bachelor), a priest at the local church who believes that the attack signals the arrival of Judgment Day. (Already Boyle’s film is unconvincing: how many clergymen in the ultra-progressive Church of England or the even more progressive Church of Scotland actually believe in the second coming of Christ?) Jimmy’s father gives his young son the silver cross he wears around his neck and tells him to flee before joyously submitting to his fate as the infected crash into the church.

We then flash-forward 28 years and find that Britain has been overrun by the highly aggressive and rapidly reproducing infected, who run around naked and live off enormous herds of CGI deer. A NATO quarantine enforced by armed patrols prevents the disease from escaping to the rest of Europe (as it briefly did in 28 Weeks Later). A tiny colony of uninfected survivors has fled to the island of Lindisfarne, which they have turned into a fortress off England’s northeast coast. This is a real place that, as in the movie, can only be reached on foot by a causeway at low tide. Lindisfarne was the home of monasteries during the Middle Ages, and its fictional residents are likewise unencumbered by electricity, electronics, or the internal-combustion engine. So, they lead an ale-guzzling medieval-cosplay lifestyle with accents of Old Blighty music hall (Tom Jones’s “Delilah” is belted out communally). A red-and-white St. George flag flies, and a vintage portrait of Queen Elizabeth II circa 1955 hangs on a wall.

If all this sounds like a heavy-handed parody of Brexit isolationism, Boyle has been keen to let us know that it is intended as such. In a June 2025 interview with Sky News, he said, “[H]orror is a wonderful genre because you can put transparencies against it, you can put COVID against it … you can put Brexit against it as well, and you read things into it like that and it’s deliciously flexible.” To hammer home the motifs of isolationism and defensiveness, Boyle repeatedly employs annoying flash clips of newsreel footage from the D-Day invasion and the Agincourt episode in Henry V (the hyper-patriotic 1944 Laurence Olivier version, not the 1989 Kenneth Branagh version), along with a vintage 1915 recording by Taylor Holmes of Rudyard Kipling’s slog-of-war poem “Boots.”

I don’t expect every fictional look at survivor life to be another Robinson Crusoe, with detailed explanations of how the lucky few improvise pots and pans and farm implements. Still, a little attention to the day-to-day practicalities of post-apocalyptic existence on a North Sea island would have helped to make the 28 Years Later universe more plausible. Where, for example, do the inhabitants get their newish-looking clothes after these 28 years of wear and tear? Is there a Marks & Spencer on the mainland for them to raid? And how are they able to spend so much time drinking? Don’t they have farming to attend to or a self-sufficient island economy to run?

In keeping with the medieval atmosphere, the community’s sole weapons (besides an impressive catapult) are bows and arrows, presumably because the fleeing survivors couldn’t get hold of firearms thanks to Britain’s draconian gun laws. The bow and arrow is effective in many ways in archaic warfare, but as we find out during the movie, it’s not the best way to defend against large numbers of supernaturally strong creatures who are chasing you at speeds faster than you can run. Furthermore, the crosses in the islanders’ graveyard consist of crudely nailed-together slats, which implies that the Lindisfarne survivors aren’t especially accomplished carpenters—so how have they managed to put together weapons that require high degrees of skilled craftsmanship? (Try making your own bow in your back yard.)

We then meet Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson)—not Jimmy but a completely different character—who is planning to take his twelve-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams), over to the mainland to make his first infected kill, even though we are told that Spike is too young for this rite of passage. Off they go anyway, over the violent objections of Jamie’s wife and Spike’s mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), who spends her days confined to a bed by an unspecified illness. After Spike nails his catch (an obese bellycrawler that feeds on earthworms), he and his father head home. When Spike asks his father about a fire he spots in the distance, Jamie tells him to pay no attention.

The pair are then attacked by a group of infected and chased home. A raucous pub celebration of their exploits follows, during which Spike learns that his father is fooling around behind his sick mother’s back with the neighbour’s wife (Amy Cameron). Spike also learns that the man responsible for the fire on the mainland is a mysterious “Dr Kelson,” a rogue physician with a taste for burning corpses. Angered by his father’s infidelity, Spike rousts his mother out of bed to take her across the causeway to find Dr Kelson, in the hope that he can cure whatever is ailing her. Spike and Isla trudge about on the mainland, occasionally warding off infected attacks as Isla drifts in and out of delirium states.

They’re briefly joined by a young Swedish soldier named Erik (Edvin Ryding), who is the last surviving member of a NATO patrol unit recently wiped out by the infected. The trio encounter an abandoned bus, inside of which they find a female infected giving birth to a baby uninfected by the Rage virus. Erik shoots the mother dead with his army rifle, whereupon the infected father (Chi Lewis-Parry)—a generously endowed Alpha male—appears and pulls Erik’s head off his shoulders with the spinal cord still attached. Before he can do the same to Isla and Spike, they are rescued by the intervention of Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who knocks the infected man out with a morphine dart.

Shaven-headed with a naked torso smeared in iodine to repel the Rage virus, Kelson certainly looks alarming, but it soon becomes apparent that he is not the homicidal ogre that the fearful islanders gossip about. Hammed up with a plummy accent by Fiennes, he is like a benign version of Francis Ford Coppola’s crazy Colonel Kurtz, the Big Man among the natives. His forest premises consist of a conglomeration of columns constructed entirely from the bones of the infected, whose flesh Kelson incinerates in his own personal oven. The architectural centrepiece of this ghoulish redoubt is an obelisk of skulls—a “memento mori [remember you will die],” Kelson explains, since neither Isla nor Spike has ever seen a piece of Renaissance dance-of-death art. “Alas, poor Erik,” he murmurs as he contemplates the dead soldier’s skull, a reference that also goes over the heads of the islanders (it didn’t get a reaction from the theatre audience either).

Kelson examines Isla and concludes she has incurable cancer, so he euthanises her (“There are many kinds of death, and some are better than others,” he reassures her) and invites Spike to add her remains to one of his towers. So Spike climbs to the pinnacle of Kelson’s private Chichén Itzá and reverently places her skull there. “Memento amoris [remember love],” says Kelson. (Latin teachers will applaud this correct use of the genitive case.) Then Spike totes the uninfected infant his mother rescued back across the causeway to Lindisfarne and drops her off with a note. In a perfunctory coda, he is rescued from a mob of infected by a gang of human bandits led by Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), the blond child from the prologue who is now an adult wearing his father’s silver cross upside-down. All that remains is to await the sequel 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, produced by Boyle and Garland but directed by Nia DaCosta, which is to be released in January 2026. Another sequel may follow that one.

As the credit-crawl began, I was bemused. This is the movie of the summer? Despite a host of tantalising themes—father–son tension, a shattered marriage, the mortality of a beloved parent—there’s hardly any narrative. The father and son never get their showdown so the matter of the infidelity remains unresolved. Isla, meanwhile, is a sickly and impassive creature who seizes a child she cannot care for and then embraces death with a gentle nudge from Kelson. I wanted to feel for young Spike—he’s just a kid, after all, in a situation not of his making—but why is he just sitting there dumbly while his mother is turned into another skull for Dr Death’s collection? Shouldn’t we see some small sign of anguish or hesitation on his part—or is 28 Years Later supposed to be propaganda for assisted suicide?

The film’s treatment of the newborn—which looks about three months old—is particularly ludicrous. I don’t know if the filmmakers used a real baby or if it was a CGI creation, but no attention is paid to how a child that young might actually behave under the circumstances or to the demands it would make of the adult caring for it. How and when was the umbilical cord cut? Where was it washed after birth? It ought to have been crying desperately for milk that Isla is unable to provide, but instead it sleeps peacefully while it is carted about like a doll amid gunfire and yelling. And what was it doing while Spike and Kelson were chatting about death and conducting their little skull-placing ceremony? Was it just left lying on the ground? The filmmakers don’t seem to be aware that an infant that age is a person with needs and interests, not just a thematic prop.